


Hear Me

by crowleyshouseplant



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-07
Updated: 2018-05-07
Packaged: 2019-05-03 09:04:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,296
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14565639
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crowleyshouseplant/pseuds/crowleyshouseplant
Summary: Leia struggles to reconcile Luke's experience with his father and hers with Darth Vader.





	Hear Me

Leia woke shivering in the night. Cold buried itself deep under her flesh, seeping into her bones, just the way it had as she curled in the corner of her cell on the Death Star. Darth Vader had entered, followed by an interrogation droid vibrating and humming as it followed his directions.

She did not remember much of that encounter—but she remembered the cold. It emanated from Vader, when that mechanical biosuit should have radiated heat.

But there was only the cold.

The rebel fleet, what remained of it after the tragedy on Scarif and their battle against the Death Star, was in orbit around the Hoth system. She had already been planet side as part of the team to determine if it was suitable for a rebel base, and even those frigid temperatures did not come close to the chills that woke her in the night, leaving a film of cold sweat across her skin.

Her father and mother would not have liked it here. In truth, neither did she. If a white wasteland was any different to Luke than a desert one, he did not mention it to her. Alderaan’s climates had been temperate and pleasant,--

She shuttered away the thought of Alderaan. There would be time for sorrow after the fighting was finished. But when would that be? Her father had worked with the Senate to stop the Clone Wars, and then immediately after that came the formation of the Galactic Empire, and the rebellion to resist it. She had been fighting and spying since she was a child.

That didn’t matter. The fighting would be over when it was over—and then there would be space and time for grief and sorrow. The braids she plaited in her hair carried the memory of her parents, and her people, until everything was over.

She turned away to try to sleep in the remaining hours before their work began anew on Hoth. In the dark shadows of the thick windows on the ship, she thought, for a moment, she saw the unmoving mask of Darth Vader. She shook her head once. Sometimes, it seemed she saw him everywhere but that was just the post-traumatic stress, at least according to the medical droid she had seen.

Hoth did not become the refuge the Rebellion had hoped it would be. The Empire found them, Vader found them, and as she fled with Han down the frozen corridors, a deeper chill trailed behind them, nipping at her heels and the tips of her fingers. Just as Han managed to put the Falcon in the air, she had seen him with his sweeping cape, staring after them as they just barely managed to escape.

But they hadn’t escaped, not really, because he found them again in Cloud City with its luminous light and golden clouds. Han, flyboy that he was, just fired his blaster at Vader, and Vader stopped the red bolts of energy with his hand.

His _hand_.

Helplessness latched onto her heart. Her hand clammed with cold and sweat in Han’s. What could she do against him when he had been present at the destruction of Alderaan? Someone that powerful could have stopped it, but he hadn’t. He had only watched, as she had been forced to watch the destruction of her home, her people, her family.

She did not struggle, though she should have. What would her father think? She followed Vader down the hall, the sweep of his black cape just inches from her knees. Chewbacca was taken away first, Han taken into another room while Lando lingered behind the door that slid closed behind him, his fingers running along the seam of his cape.

She was alone with Vader, who took her to a chamber of her own. He gestured toward a chair and she stood behind it, clenching the back with her fists.

“We meet again.”

“I knew you’re the Emperor’s lap dog, but I hadn’t realized you were also Captain Obvious,” Leia said, attempting to summon scraps of bravado that had once come so easily to her before she had lost so much. “Whatever it is you want to know, do you really think I would tell you?”

“You would not need to speak. Your feelings betray you.”

Her mouth numbed from the cold. “So no need for interrogation droids this time around?”

“You are afraid, though you hide it well. It will not save you or your friends.”

Leia determined that she would not give him the satisfaction of an answer. He left her with the cold and a locked door. A few minutes later, she heard Han’s screams. Her eyes closed. Her chin flexed as pressure increased on her sinuses and tears pricked her eyes. She could not cry—she could not afford such grief. The fighting was not yet over, though she did not know what more she could do.

Vader wasn’t like the Empire. The Empire was a structure. The Empire would continue with or without Vader, just as it could fall with or without him. But trapped in this room, alone with him and the power of the Force he commanded—she took a shuddering breath.

Stormtroopers opened her room, and dragged her by the elbows to join her friends. Lando came, a man caught in Vader’s grasp, just as powerless as any one of them, and told them what he knew.

Luke had a power that she could not understand, but it would be no match for Vader. She hoped he would stay far away from this place, but that wasn’t Luke’s way. Even as she screamed that it was a trap he didn’t turn and follow her, but continued onwards towards him, towards Vader, as if he had not heard her, as if she screamed into a void. He lost a hand for his trouble, and a knowledge that he did not share with her, though she could see the conflict in his eyes.

“How did you know where I was? How did you hear me?” he asked her as he tinkered with his mechanical hand.

Leia shrugged. “I just knew.”

He looked at her strangely then. “Just a feeling you had?”

Leia nodded. Thinking about it as she waited for sleep to come to her later that night, she realized she had gravitated towards the location she felt warmth, which had been a relief after surviving the cold she felt whenever Vader was near. She thought about asking someone about it, maybe Lando who maybe felt it too, perhaps, or Luke, but embarrassment and shame stopped her. It was just the fear and the hopelessness, when she was supposed to be more than that. She was the figurehead of the rebellion, the last Princess of Alderaan, queen of the rebellion’s heart as she had nothing of her own.

She could be nothing less than a tower of strength.

It was exhausting.

Vader was a distant thought as she pursued Han to Tatooine with Lando and Luke. Luke was different here, stronger, more confident in his power.

She was not prepared when he told her why he was so strong with the Force. That Vader was his father. The Force, he told her, runs strong in my family. My father has it. I have it. My sister has it.

Her. Leia. Perhaps she had always known that Luke was her brother but she had not known that Vader was her father too.

Her father had interrogated her. Her father had allowed Tarkin to destroy her planet, and kill her parents. Her father had relentlessly hunted Luke down, had tortured them all to lure Luke to him, and Luke ran after him because he sensed there was still good in Vader?

If there was good in him, she didn’t see it. The only thing she saw in Vader was the one person that froze her heart, sealing the hope she cultivated in the name of Alderaan and her family and her people in that terrible, unyielding cold.

Han didn’t understand. But she asked him to hold her against the chill of the evening, and he did, and that was all that mattered.

But, against all odds, they won. The Death Star was blown from the sky. Luke came back to them with a clarity and sense of purpose she had not sensed in him. Later that night, when everyone else was asleep, he told her.

“I was right. There was good in him. He saved me and I saved him,” he added, almost wonderingly as he gazed at his robotic hand, stripped of its black glove. There were scorch marks on his clothes, and she almost asked what, exactly, Vader had saved him from what—but she didn’t. “He wasn’t Vader at the end. He was Anakin Skywalker…my father. Our father.”

Nausea roiled in Leia’s stomach as she listened. His Jedi reflexes were apparently more attuned to his murderous dad than to her because he didn’t seem to notice as he told her about how he had dragged his father’s heavy, metal-cased body to the ship, how he had seen his face for the first time, and how he had burned him in the tradition of the Jedi.

Leia nodded, focusing on how glad she was that Luke was alive, and that he seemed fulfilled and complete. She had dreamed of this moment, of the triumph of the Rebellion, but she was riddled with holes. One for Alderaan, another for the people she had lost under her command, and more empty spaces than she could name. When Luke finally fell asleep beside Wedge, Leia went into the woods. She followed the smell of smoke, and it did not take her long to find the funeral pyre he had made for Vader.

“You’re not my father,” she said to the twisted mask. “You allowed my father to die on Alderaan. I don’t care what Luke said: whatever good you had in you was never meant for me.”

She covered her mouth with her hands. The tears were coming, and she didn’t think she could stop them this time. But the fighting was over, wasn’t it? Was it finally time to grieve?

A shimmer of blue appeared beside her, and she fell over backwards. A stone dug into the small of her back. A man in Jedi robes stood before her. His hair was longer, and there was a scar over his eye.

She knew, somehow, that this was Anakin Skywalker before he took on the name Darth Vader.

“Get away from me,” she said.

The ghost dissipated, but not before she heard a barely whispered, “I’m sorry, Leia.”

She shook her head against the words. She didn’t care. They meant nothing to her. What were words without action?

His force ghost was gone, but how could he truly leave her if the Force connected all living things, and he was one with the Force? How could he truly leave her when her terror of Vader woke her constantly in the night, shivering and cold?

As they attempted to reform the Republic, Luke would sometimes tell her about his conversations with Anakin, but Leia didn’t want to hear, and she politely asked him to stop telling her these things.

Luke replied with something that Yoda had told him in the swamps of Dagobah. “Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”

“That’s bantha shit,” Leia said. “I can be angry, and I will be angry, because it’s my people that are gone, Luke. And it’s because of _him_.”

Later, she remembered that Luke had lost his people too—Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru and Ben Kenobi—at the hands of his father.

She wondered how he had gotten over that, but did not ask. She wasn’t a Jedi like her bio-father before her, so she would handle her anger at Vader the same way she always had: by channeling it into support efforts for the remaining Alderaanians, and creating a republic that was better than the one that came before it.

Hope could not be placed in the Jedi Order that Luke was attempting to restore. The Jedi Order was few, but the people in their communities could be many. That was where she focused her efforts, even after the birth of her son, Ben, which she named for Luke’s sake.

She had not known Kenobi as he had.

Luke smiled gratefully at her. “He is strong with the force,” he said, eyes shining.

_The Force is strong with my family._

But Ben was not the promise that Luke was hoping he would be. Even she could sense the darkness growing in him. There was no explanation for it. Though she had not wanted Ben to join Luke’s Jedi Order, she sent him there anyway because who could better help Ben than Luke? She was not too proud to think that she was the only person who could help him.

Luke would see the good in Ben, like Leia saw it, and he would preserve it so it would grow strong again, just as he had once before.

But that didn’t happen either, and one day Leia grasped her heart as a cold spear drove through it. A few days later, she learned about the slaughter at Luke’s temple, but she could not find Luke in the Force, though she knew he was not yet dead.

“Luke,” she whispered, “hear me. Come back.” They could grieve together. They didn’t have to bear this loss alone.

But she knew her brother. She did not know the details of what happened, but she knew that Luke would struggle with his failure. How could he have saved his father, and failed to save is nephew?

Because they were two different people, she told him just in case he could hear her. Please come home.

As the First Order gained power, when Ben took the name Kylo Ren, when Han left because he could not bear what had happened, Leia devoted her efforts to finding Luke and leading the Resistance—just as she had as a young woman. She did not believe Luke could single-handedly save the galaxy, though she did not discourage the rhetoric that had taken hold about his legendary exploits as a Jedi Master, but she knew that she must find him. 

He was her brother. 

Should she be using the resources of the Resistance for such personal reasons? Probably not. But they believed that Luke Skywalker held the last remaining hope in the galaxy, though they only needed to look inwards, towards themselves, to see it shining there. And, like it or not, Luke was a symbol—just as she had been when the loss of Alderaan was a fresh wound in the galaxy.

That particular wound still ached for Leia, and reopened when Starkiller Base fired its planet killing weapon on the Hosnian system. Five planets were gone, just like Alderaan, destroyed. She thought of the families who did not have members off world, whose entire lines were wiped away with a single press of a button. Who would remember them? Who was left? And maybe her son had not pulled the trigger, but he had watched it happen. He had allowed it to happen. 

But she could not betray him by giving up hope. He was her son, and she knew that where Luke had failed, Han may succeed because he was his father. And then, that cold spear through her heart again as Han died at the hands of his son, her son, their son.

Loss carved its way through her. Her call for Luke echoed in the empty chambers of her heart, and she tried not to be angry at him. If he knew about Han, he would only blame himself, and why should she be part of that?

As their remaining ships fled through hyperspace, Leia clasped her hands. Perhaps, in this moment, she understood why Luke had acted as he did on Endor, disappearing into the forest to plead with a man to act upon the goodness he still believed to be in him despite all evidence to the contrary, despite Alderaan.

She also understood why the people under her command wished for the deaths of Kylo (her son) and Hux and Snoke and every other person who held power in the First Order that had allowed this tragedy to happen. How could she blame them? She knew their reasons. She had thought them herself towards another man a long time ago.

For the first time in her many years, she whispered, “Anakin…are you there?” Would he even come if he heard her? She had certainly given him no reason to do so, but that was his own fault.

The seat beside her shimmered blue. He was as young as she remembered him the first time he had revealed himself to her. She averted her eyes. She could still see the mask of Darth Vader lurking in the shadows.

“Leia,” Anakin said.

“I think my son is lost,” she said, her voice breaking. 

“No one is every truly lost.”

“Not even you?” 

He paused. “I knew the path I was following, I knew where it led. I knew that Padme could not follow it with me. I knew that Obi-Wan would try to stop me. But that did not stop me from rationalizing my decisions.”

Leia wondered what Ben told himself when he was alone in the cold.

“Then why did you do it?” She looked at him. His eyes were sad, just like the eyes of her mother.

“I was afraid, and I saw no other way. I had already lost so much.”

She nodded. She understood that.

“But one choice changed everything. Just because I had made a hundred bad choices before didn’t mean I was trapped in making another wrong choice. So I chose to save my son. Perhaps Ben will realize this truth.” 

“And perhaps not.”

Anakin nodded.

They were silent. Leia wanted to ask about Luke, but there was no point. If Luke had shut himself off from the Force, and Anakin existed only through that living Force, then he would not be able to offer any insight. She could not give anything more to Luke but time, and she would give him as much of what remained to her as he needed. She only prayed he would not wait too long.

“I can’t forgive you, Anakin” Leia said, finally. “But you heard my call, and you came.” Perhaps, that was another good choice he made after a lifetime of wrong choices. 

“I will always be with you whenever you want me. I will not fail you again, not even in death.”

Her face crumpled, and she forced herself to breathe slowly and with purpose like Luke had shown her. “I miss Luke.”

“I believe he will find his way back to us,” Anakin said. 

Leia nodded. “Me too. But it’s hard right now. I’m so tired.” She could not say that to anyone on this ship, but at least she could confess it to him. He would know, after all. Before he was Darth Vader, he had been a general in the Clone Wars, a war that seemed to be without end. 

“I know,” Anakin said. “I’m sorry. You should rest. You must be prepared for the days ahead.”

Leia nodded. She did not know specifically what Anakin was referring to, but she sensed it just as well as he. His form vanished as the ship dropped out of hyperspace, with the First Order not far behind, and he whispered in her heart, “May the Force be with you always.”


End file.
